I met Walter Cole at a coffee shop down on Second Avenue. Police cadets passed back and forth by our window, hauling black knapsacks and looking more like soldiers than cops. I tried to remember when I was like them, and found that I couldn’t. It was as though some parts of my past had been closed off to me while others continued to leach into the present, like toxic runoff poisoning what might once have been fertile soil. The city had changed so much since the attacks, and the cadets, with their military appearance, now seemed more suited to its streets than I did. New Yorkers had been reminded of their own mortality, their susceptibility to harm from outside agencies, with the consequence that they, and the streets that they loved, had been altered irrevocably. I was reminded of women I had seen in the course of my work, women whose husbands had lashed out at them once and would lash out at them again. They seemed always to be braced for another blow, even as they hoped that it would not come, that something might have altered in the demeanor of the one who had hurt them before.
My father once hit my mother. I was young, no more than seven or eight, and she had started a small fire in the kitchen while she was frying some pork chops for his dinner. There was a phone call for her, and she left the kitchen to take it. A friend’s son had won a scholarship to some big university, a particular cause for celebration as her husband had died suddenly some years before and she had struggled to bring up their three children in the years that followed. My mother stayed on the phone just a little too long. The oil in the pan began to hiss and smoke, and the flames from the gas ring rose higher. A dish towel began to smolder, and suddenly there was smoke pouring from the kitchen. My father got there just in time to stop the curtains from igniting, and used a damp cloth to smother the oil in the pan, burning his hand slightly in the process. By this point my mother had abandoned her call and I followed her into the kitchen, where my father was running cold water over his hand.
“Oh no,” she said. “I was just —”
And my father hit her. He was frightened and angry. He didn’t hit her hard. It was an open-handed slap, and he tried to pull the blow as he realized what he was doing, but it was too late. He struck her on the cheek and she staggered slightly, then touched her hand gently to her skin, as though to confirm to herself that she had been hit. I looked at my father, and the blood was already leaving his face. I thought he was about to fall over, for he seemed to teeter on his feet.
“Lord, I’m sorry,” he said.
He tried to go to her, but she pushed him away. She couldn’t look at him. In all their years together, he had never once laid a hand upon her in anger. He rarely even raised his voice to her. Now the man she knew as her husband was suddenly gone, and a stranger revealed in his stead. At that moment, the world was no longer the place that she had once thought it to be. It was alien, and dangerous, and her vulnerability was exposed to her.
Looking back, I don’t know if she ever truly forgave him. I don’t believe that she did, for I don’t think that any woman can ever really forgive a man who raises his hand to her, especially not one whom she loves and trusts. The love suffers a little, but the trust suffers more, and somewhere, deep inside herself, she will always be wary of another strike. The next time, she tells herself, I will leave him. I will never let myself be hit again. Mostly, though, they stay. In my father’s case, there would never be a next time, but my mother was not to know that, and nothing he could ever do in the years that followed would ever convince her otherwise.
And as strangers passed by, dwarfed by the immensity of the buildings around them, I thought: What have they done to this city?
Walter tapped the tabletop with his finger.
“You still with us?” he asked.
“I was just reminiscing.”
“Getting nostalgic?”
“Only for our order. By the time it arrives, inflation will have kicked in.”
Somewhere in the distance I could see our waitress idly spinning a mint on the counter.
“We should have made her commit to a price before she left,” said Walter. “Heads up, they’re here.”
Two men weaved through the tables, making their way toward us. Both wore casual jackets, one with a tie, one without. The taller of the two men was probably nudging six two, while the smaller was about my height. Short of having blue lights strapped to their heads and Crown Vic-shaped shoes, they couldn’t have screamed “Cops!” any louder. Not that it mattered in this place: a few years back, two guys fresh off the boat from Puerto Rico — literally, as they hadn’t been in the city more than a day or two — tried to take down the diner, home to cops since time immemorial, at around midnight, armed with a hammer and a carving knife. They got as far as “This is a —” before they were looking down the barrels of about thirty assorted weapons. A framed front page from the Post now hung on the wall behind the register. It showed a photograph of the two geniuses, below the block headline DUMB AND DUMBER.
Walter rose to shake hands with the two detectives, and I did the same as he introduced me. The tall one was named Mackey, the short one was Dunne. Anybody hoping to use them as proof that the Irish still dominated the NYPD was likely to be confused by the fact that Dunne was black and Mackey looked Asian, although they pretty much made the case that the Celts could charm the pants off just about any race.
“How you doin?” Dunne said to me as he sat down. I could see that he was sizing me up. I hadn’t met him before, but like most of his kind who had been around for longer than a few years he knew my history. He’d probably heard the stories as well. I didn’t care if he believed them or not, as long as it didn’t get in the way of what we were trying to do.
Mackey seemed more interested in the waitress than he was in me. I wished him luck. If she treated her suitors like she treated her customers, then Mackey would be a very old and very frustrated man by the time he got anywhere with this woman.
“Nice pins,” he said admiringly. “What’s she like from the front?”
“Can’t remember,” said Walter. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen her face.”
Mackey and Dunne were part of the NYPD’s Vice Division, and had been for the past five years. The city spent $23 million each year on prostitution control, but “control” was the operative term. Prostitution wasn’t going to disappear, no matter how much money the city threw at the problem, and so it was a matter of prioritizing. Mackey and Dunne were part of the Sexual Exploitation of Children Squad, which worked all five boroughs, tackling child porn, prostitution, and child sex rings. They had their work cut out: 325,000 children were subjected to sexual exploitation every year, of whom over half were runaways or kids who had been thrown out of their home by their parents or guardians. New York acted like a magnet for them. There were over five thousand children working as prostitutes in the city at any time, and no shortage of men willing to pay for them. The squad used young-looking female cops, some, incredibly, capable of passing for thirteen or fourteen, to lure “chicken hawks,” as pedophile johns liked to term themselves. Most, if caught patronizing, would avoid jail time if they had no previous history, but at least they would be mandated to register as sex offenders and could then be monitored for the rest of their lives.
The pimps were harder to catch, and their methods were becoming more sophisticated. Some of the pimps had gang affiliations, which made them even more dangerous to both the girls and the cops. Then there were those who were actively engaged in trafficking young girls across state lines. In January 2000, a sixteen-year-old Vermont girl named Christal Jones was found smothered in an apartment on Zerega Avenue in Hunts Point, one of a number of Vermont girls lured to New York in an apparently well organized Burlington-to-the-Bronx sex ring. With deaths like Christal’s, suddenly $23 million didn’t seem like nearly enough.
Mackey and Dunne were over on the East Side to talk to the cadets about their work, but it appeared to have done little for their confidence in the future of the force.
“All these kids want to do is catch terrorist
s,” said Dunne. “They had their way, this city would be bought and sold ten times over while they were interrogating Muslims about their diet.”
Our waitress returned from far-off places, bearing coffee and bagels.
“Sorry, boys,” she said. “I got distracted.”
Mackey saw an opening and rushed to take advantage of it.
“What happened, gorgeous, you catch sight of yourself in a mirror?”
The waitress, whose name was Mylene, whatever kind of name that was, favored him with the same look she might have given a mosquito that had the temerity to land on her during the height of the West Nile virus scare.
“Nope, caught sight of you and had to wait for my beating heart to be still,” she said. “Thought I was gonna die, you’re so good looking. Menus are on the table. I’ll be back with coffee.”
“Don’t count on it,” said Walter as she vanished.
“Think you got some sarcasm on you there,” Dunne remarked to his partner.
“Yeah, it burns. Still, that lady looks like a million dollars.”
Walter and I exchanged glances. If that waitress looked like a million dollars, then it was all in used bills.
The pleasantries over, Walter brought us down to business.
“You got anything for us?” he asked.
“G-Mack: real name Tyrone Baylee,” said Dunne. He pretty much expectorated the name. “This guy was made to be a pimp, you catch my drift.”
I knew what he meant. Men who pimp women tend to be smarter than the average criminal. Their social skills are relatively good, which enables them to handle the prostitutes in their charge. They tend to shy away from extreme violence, although most consider it their duty and their right to keep their women in place with a well-placed slap when circumstances require it. In short, they’re cowards, but cowards gifted with a degree of cunning, a capacity for emotional and psychological manipulation, and sometimes a self-deluding belief that theirs is a victimless crime since they are merely providing a service to both the whores and the men who patronize them.
“He’s got a prior for assault. He only served six months, but he did them in Otisville, and it wasn’t a happy time for him. His name came up during a narcotics investigation a year or two back, but he was pretty low down on the food chain and a search of his place turned up nothing. Seems that experience encouraged him to find an alternative outlet for his talents. He got himself a small stable of women, but he’s been trying to build it up over the last couple of months. A pimp called Free Billy died a few weeks back — they called him Free Billy on account of the fact that he claimed his rates were so low he was practically giving his whores away for nothing — and his girls were divided up by the rest of the sharks out on the Point. G-Mack had to wait his turn, and by all accounts there wasn’t much left for him once the others had taken their pick.”
“The girl you’re asking after — Alice Temple, street name LaShan — she was one of Free Billy’s,” said Mackey, taking up the baton. “According to the cops who work the Point she was a good-looking woman once, but she was using, and using hard. She didn’t look like she was going to last much longer, even on the Point. G-Mack’s been telling people that he let her go cause she wasn’t worth anything to him. Said nobody was going to pay good money for a woman looked like she might be dying of the virus. Seems she was friendly with a whore named Sereta. Black Mexican. They came as a twofer. Looks like she dropped off the map about the same time as your girl, but unlike her friend, she didn’t appear again.”
I leaned forward.
“What do you mean by that?”
“This Alice was picked up close by Kings Highway about a week or so ago. Possession of a controlled substance. Looked like she’d just come out to score. Beat cops found her with the needle in her arm. She didn’t even have time to inject.”
“She was arrested?”
“It was a quiet night, so her bail was set before the sun came up. She made it within the hour.”
“Who paid it?”
“Bail bondsman named Eddie Tager. Her court date was set for the nineteenth, so she still has a couple of days left.”
“Is Eddie Tager G-Mack’s bondsman?”
Dunne shrugged. “He’s pretty low-end, so it’s possible, but most pimps tend to pay bail for their whores themselves. It’s usually set low, and it allows them to get their hooks deeper into the girl. In Manhattan, first-timers usually just get compulsory health and safe-sex education, but the other boroughs don’t have court-based programs to meet the needs of prostitutes, so it goes harder on them over there. The cops who spoke to G-Mack say he denied just about everything except his birth.”
“Why were they interested in him?”
“Because of the murder of an antiques dealer named Winston Allen. Allen had a taste for whores from the Point, and there was a rumor that maybe two of G-Mack’s girls were among them. G-Mack claimed that they had it all wrong, but the date would tie in with the disappearance of Alice and her friend. We didn’t know that when she was picked up, though, and her prints didn’t match the partials we got from Allen’s house when she was processed.”
“Anyone talk with Tager?”
“He’s proving hard to find, and nobody has the time it takes to go looking under rocks for him. Let’s be straight here: if you and Walter hadn’t come along asking questions, Alice Temple would be struggling for attention, even with the death of Winston Allen. Women disappear from the Point. It happens.”
Something passed between Dunne and Mackey. Neither was about to put it into words, though, not without some pushing.
“Lately more than usual?”
It was a blind throw, but it hit home.
“Maybe. It’s just rumors, and talk from programs like GEMS and ECPAT, but there’s no pattern, which presents a problem, and the ones who are going missing are mostly homeless, or don’t have anyone to report them, and it’s not just women either. Basically, what we got is a spike in the Bronx figures over the past six months. It might be meaningless or it might not, but unless we start turning up bodies, it’s going to stay a blip.”
It didn’t help us much, but it was good to know.
“So back to business,” said Mackey. “We figure that maybe if we feed you this information, you’ll help us by taking some of the pressure off, and maybe find out something we can use on G-Mack along the way.”
“Such as?”
“He’s got a young girl working for him. He keeps her pretty close, but her name is Ellen. We’ve tried talking to her, but we’ve got nothing on her to justify pulling her in, and G-Mack has his women schooled halfway to Christmas on entrapment. Juvenile Crime hasn’t had any luck with her either. If you find out anything about her, maybe you’ll tell us.”
“We hear G-Mack called your girl a skank, a junkie skank,” said Mackey. “Thought you might like to know that, just in case you were planning on talking with him.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said. “What’s his territory?”
“His girls tend to work the lower end of Lafayette. He likes to keep an eye on them, so he usually parks on the street close by. I hear he’s driving a Cutlass Supreme on big-ass tires now, seventy-one, seventy-two, maybe, like he’s some kind of millionaire rapper.”
“How long has he been driving the Cutlass?”
“Not long.”
“Must be doing okay if he can afford a car like that.”
“I guess. We didn’t see no tax return, so I can’t say for sure, but he seems to have come into money recently.”
Mackey kept his eyes fixed on me as I spoke. I nodded once, letting him know that I understood what he was intimating: someone had paid him to keep quiet about the women.
“Does he have a place?”
“He lives over on Quimby. Couple of his women live with him. Seems he has a crib over in Brooklyn as well, down on Coney Island Ave. He moves between them.”
“Weapons?”
“None of these guys are dumb enough to
carry. The more established ones, they maybe keep one or two knuckle grazers that they can call on in case of trouble, but G-Mack ain’t in that league yet.”
The waitress returned. She looked a whole lot less happy to be coming back than she did when she came over the first time, and she hadn’t exactly been ecstatic then.
Dunne and Mackey ordered a tuna on rye and a turkey club. Dunne asked for a “side of sunshine” with his tuna. You had to admire his perseverance.
“Salad or fries,” said the waitress. “Sunshine is extra, and you’ll have to eat it outside.”
“How about fries and a smile?” said Dunne.
“How about you have an accident, then I’ll smile?” She left. The world breathed easier.
“You got a death wish, man,” said Mackey.
“I could die in her arms,” said Dunne.
“You dying on your sorry ass right now, and you ain’t even near her arms.”
He sighed, and poured so much sugar into his coffee his spoon pretty much stood up straight in it.
“So, you think G-Mack knows where this woman is at?” asked Mackey.
I shrugged. “We’re going to ask him that.”
“You think he’s going to tell you?”
I thought of Louis, and what he would do to G-Mack for hitting Martha. “Eventually,” I said.
6
Jackie O was one of the old-time macks, the kind who believed that a man should dress the part. He typically wore a canary yellow suit for business, set off by a white shirt with a pink tie, and yellow and white patent leather shoes. A full-length white leather coat with yellow trim was draped across his shoulders in cold weather, and the ensemble was completed by a white fedora with a pink feather. He carried an antique black cane, topped with a silver horse’s head. The head could be removed with a twist, freeing the eighteen-inch blade that was concealed inside. The cops knew that Jackie O carried a sword stick, but Jackie O was never questioned or searched. He was occasionally a good source of information, and as one of the senior figures at the Point he was accorded a modicum of respect. He kept a close eye on the women who worked for him, and tried to treat them right. He paid for their rubbers, which was more than most pimps did, and made sure each was equipped with a pen loaded with pepper spray before she hit the streets. Jackie O was also smart enough to know that wearing fine clothes and driving a nice car didn’t mean that what he did had any class, but it was all that he knew how to do. He used his earnings to buy modern art, but he sometimes thought that even the most beautiful of his paintings and sculptures were sullied by the manner in which he had funded their purchase. For that reason he liked to trade up, in the hope that by doing so he might slowly erase the stain upon his collection.